Islands which have never existed have made their ways onto maps nonetheless – Nicholas Hasluck

OVERVIEW

This project is a “call for proposals” inviting artists, designers, writers, and architects to respond to Habitat Compensation Island, a man-made island located off Abu Dhabi coast in the UAE, through the design of a monument designed for the island. With-out the intention of building such a monument at this time, but rather as a platform for speculation, we invite proposals that engage the ideas embodied by Habitat Island – a designed assemblage of dreams and dredge located at the edge of a new Supermax shipping channel - and ideas about the form and function of monuments, counter-monuments, and anti-monuments in the Anthropocene.

The structure of this project is rhizomatic. We are two American artists interested in contributing to the growing global network of creative practitioners and thinkers focused on climate change and the complex economic and political forces/systems that have created it.

We have started this project through outreach to our immediate creative networks for participation, and are seeking introductions to networks beyond our reach. We ask those invited to participate to please forward an invitation to a colleague and/or network.

All proposals will be included in a publication. Se-lected proposals may be included in future exhibi-tions. Project participants will be invited to future events connected to the project.

Please see a detailed description and proposal submission specifications below.

Monuments for Habitat IslandCall for proposals

“Monuments for Habitat Island” is a curatorial initiative by Nancy Nowacek and Marina Zurkow, supported through a research grant from New York University Abu Dhabi.

www.monumentisland.cominfo@monumentisland.com

The concept of “island” has long been in the artistic and literary imaginary1—especially a desert island.

In the physical world, increasing-ly, man-made islands serve as a strategy of urban expansion, eco-nomic development, and material reuse. As artists committed to exploring the complexities of en-vironmental issues in the Anthro-pocene, we believe the artificial island to be a specific new form of the island imaginary, meriting context and critical speculation.

The Anthropocene is broadly defined as the current geologic era in which human activity is creating change that formerly took eons to enact upon the earth. As human and geological temporal-ities converge, and the pace of climatic shifts increase, a land-form type as concise, contained, and isolated as the artificial island offers a particular opportunity to contemplate ideas and scales of time, timeliness, and timelessness.

This introduction necessarily shuttles back and forth, weaving the imaginary and the earth-bound. Can artificial islands serve as models for environmental innovation and offer ecological reparations amidst the tug of hu-man-centered interests? In what ways are these kinds of islands a tabula rasa for the environmental imagination? The interweaving of resource management, econom-ic progress, and environmental

care in the 21st century amidst a changing climate is one of the greatest complexities of modern life. As in so many places, this complexity—and the strategies to address it—exists where we are presently working in the United Arab Emirates, and is seen in systems and initiatives to desali-nate water, cultivate global trade, protect flora and fauna, and cre-ate new approaches to sustain-ability in a challenging climate.

SITE

Habitat Island, an artificial island off the coast of Abu Dhabi and the subject of this call, reflects the ambition to address all of these contingencies. We—artists working in the region, but not from this region—fell under the spell of this island that appears “out of nowhere,” a desert island with its invitation of ‘blank space’...and the insistent presence of its bleached billboards.

We believe in the experimental drive and culture of collabora-tion that created this island. We believe in its real and symbolic value—the designed assemblage of dreams and dredge. This call is a proposal for a monument to these ideas, to be situated on Habitat Island. See more informa-tion about the Island and region below.

INTRODUCTION

“Monuments for Habitat Island” is an invitation to create propos-als for this small, artificial sand mass—a manifestation of the challenges facing public policy and political priorities in response to the environmental costs of contemporary life. As a platform for creative and cross-disci-plinary engagement in some of the most urgent questions faced by communities and leaders around the world, this call and its entries might also reimagine the monument as a speculative tool to spark future imaginaries, and suggest interventions into unused, neglected, or environmentally compromised spaces.

A monument calls attention-to; it is traditionally a marker that commemorates an important site, cultural symbol, or person. Mon-uments join distinctly different temporal and spatial registers (Here, Now, There, Then) and they are realized to imbue value: Commemorative Value, Histori-cal Value, Age Value, Art Value, Newness Value2. There is also precedent in the construction of “counter-monuments,” which are designed to be “mobile, dispersed, transient, or demand interaction...not to consolidate cultural memory but to provoke communicative memory, debate and action”3 and which might collapse a variety of temporalities, including the geologic, human, cultural, and technological.

We invite monument designs that respond to the island’s ambitions and conditions. We welcome diverse viewpoints in the form of proposals for sculptural, perfor-mative, and conceptual inter-ventions, providing thoughtful reflection and provocation that will speak to the intersection of men-tal models, materiality, and the concerns of a more-than-human world. We imagine that your vivid propositions will contribute to the ongoing inquiry into (how we navigate the interests) navigations between cultural spaces, ecolog-ical spaces, economic spaces, and their divergent material and temporal demands.

By generating an archive of cre-ative approaches to the complex challenges embodied in Habitat Island we hope to seed a global cross-disciplinary dialogue that will bring artistic practices in con-versation with scientists, planners, and other stakeholders4. The monument proposals’ perspec-tives, practices, and experiences will be transmitted through our archive, and circulated through symposia, publication and other potential exhibition formats. We are planning to exhibit this work in local and global contexts, with the intention of interconnecting com-munities to further their strategies for positive change.

Footnotes

1. For instance, in literature in Homer’s Odyssey; The Arabian Nights; Sindbad; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Defoe’s Rob-inson Crusoe; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; in the mythical sites of Avalon, and Atlantis.

2. By Commemorative Value, Historical Value, Age Value, Art Value, Newness Value we are referencing the work of Bron-islaw Szerszynski’s article (cited below) on monumental temporalities.

3. Szerszynski, B. (2017). The Anthro-pocene Monument. European Journal of Social Theory.

4. The audience for this project spirals outward from artists, writers, designers, architects, curators and cultural institutions engaged in new forms of land art, environ-mental art and climate change initiatives, toward urban planning, environmental engineering, and environmental and natural sciences. We also hope that this work invites those studying and engaged in global commerce, modern Middle Eastern Studies, and those interested in the form of the island as subject matter.

THE PROJECT

PROPOSAL FORMAT

Please email proposals to info@monumentisland.com

Proposals should be sent as 1-3 high resolution .jpeg or .tif images 6000 pixels (or 20” at 300 dpi) on the long edge, OR, 1-3 pages of writing (12 points on 1.5 line spacing)

Proposals should be accompanied by a PDF con-taining the following information:

• Name

• Contact information

• 500 word proposal overview (max)

• 100 word bio

• 1-3 high-resolution .jpeg or .tif images 6000 pixels (or 20” at 300 dpi) on the long edge

• 80 word max descriptions for each image (op-tional)

High resolution images of the island can be supplied upon request

Proposal Considerations

• Strategies of climate mitigation and maintenance; dredging and land reclamation

• Interplay of environmental advocacy and economic development of natural resources

• Interrelation of global economic systems (shipping) and local environmental systems (urban ecologies)

• Scales of time and the particularities of hu-man-made islands as temporal sculptures

• The consideration of both specific and general publics: shipping channel workers, various waterway users, and non-human inhabitants

• The Anthropocene as both foreground and backdrop

Habitat Island from Google Earth

Habitat Island lies approximately 5 miles and a 15-minute speed boat ride from Emirates Palace Marina and lies between Umm ad Dalkh—an offshore oil field, and the edge of Mussafah Industrial Area shipping channel, in the Arabian Gulf. Cargo ship workers might wonder in passing about the tiny C-shaped island with its bleached, blank billboards.

Habitat Island (short for “The Habitat Compensation Island”) was created in 2009 from marine dredge (also known as dredge spoils). Initiated by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Urban Planning and Municipalities (DPM), and realized by the National Marine Dredging Company (NMDC), the island was intended to provide some ecological compensation for damage done by channel dredging. The island’s loca-tion was chosen specifically to minimize further environmental disturbance. Mangroves were planted on the inside of the “C” shape—designed as a shallow lagoon. There was a vision plan to transform Habitat Island into an ecological preserve and an edu-cation-focused destination. The timeline for realizing that full vision is as of yet undesignated.

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates is situ-ated on the Saudi Arabian penin-sula which forms the Arabian Gulf, a region comprised of islands and dunes, oil and oases. Abu Dhabi is the capital of the seven emir-ates. It is a spatially compressed region, in which mountains, ce-ment factories, deserts, wetlands, and skyscrapers are all within a 3 hour coastal marine drive from north to south.

Abu Dhabi is a natural archipela-go of over 200 islands of varying sizes and states: some are home to rare species of flora; some are densely developed. The Arabian Gulf in which these islands are floating is home to important com-mercial fisheries and oil and gas reserves. Situated between an oil field and a shipping channel in the Gulf, Habitat Island was designed to compensate for environmental damage caused by the creation of a new shipping channel, by repur-posing its dredge spoils. The vi-sion for the island was to provide a new home for marine species via the introduction of a mangrove forest. An ambitious experimental project of marine engineering and environmental problem-solving, Habitat Island itself is a monu-ment to ecological optimism.

ABOUT HABITAT ISLAND AND ITS ENVIRONS

Site description

The channel is 63.5 km long and 200 m wide, with a depth of 9 m. The project entailed dredging 65,000,000 m³ of soil, using the latest cutting and suction dredger technology. One area of beneficial re-use of the dredged material was the design and creation of a new ‘Habitat’ island.

This island was constructed using 7,000,000 m³ of surplus material.

It was shaped to create an ide-al habitat for mangroves, fish, insects and birds.

This was the first project of its kind in Abu Dhabi and set a benchmark for future marine projects.

The island is designed in such a way that it will shape itself natural-ly over time.

(source: NMDC)

Site scope

• Dredging: 65,000,000 m³ of dense sand of which 7,000,000 m³ is placed in the habitat compensation island.

• Breakwater: 10,000 m³ of core material and armour.

• Navigational Aids: 84 buoys complete with anchor chains and blocks with focal planes ranging from 1.9 m to a fair-way marker buoy with a focal plane of 4.1 m.

• Services Diversions: diversion of 3 water lines 2 km long, a marine telephone cable and two power cables diverted using directional drilling/pipe jacking methods.

• Mangrove Planting: approx-imately 350,000 mangrove seedlings covering an area of around 60,000 m²

Current site conditions

• A survey of the island in early 2019 showed the following conditions:

• Erosion on the southwest arm of the island between island structure and breakwater

• Deposits of plastic waste ranging type from gas cans to milk crates, water bottles, etc.

• Several provisional structures and one jet ski indicating leisure activities

• One standing billboard

• One downed billboard

• Uneven coastline and sea bottom indicating turbulence and sand movement

• Mangroves present on pro-tected interior of the “C” shape

• Scant observable wildlife

Habitat Island Navigational map

Marina Zurkow is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections. She uses systems, materials, and technologies – including food, software, and animation – to foster intimate connections between people and non-hu-man agents. Most recently, she has collaborated with UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) and chefs Hank and Bean on Making the Best of It: Nimble Foods for Climate Chaos, a series of tasting events using regional species indicative of anthropogenic environmental change. Zurkow has been granted awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Coun-cil for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Cre-ative Capital. Her work has been exhibited at Storm King Art Center (New York), Chronos Art Center (Shanghai), the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and Sundance New Frontiers, among other sites. She is on faculty at New York University and is represented by bitforms gallery. She would rather be in the ocean than on Mars.

Nancy Nowacek is an interdisciplinary artist focused on the exchange between the body, the designed world, the cultural values that inform them and their impacts. She creates participatory plat-forms, images, and objects that invite movement and other forms of physical engagement that bring the world into the body to engender a sense of belong-ing, solidity, and agency in an increasingly uncertain world. Her current research topics—islands, ageism, plastics—engage questions of time, value, reuse and discard. She recently created a Menopause Pop-Up Gift Shop to create space, education and commu-nity around Menopause, funded by the Brooklyn Arts Council. She has received residencies and fellowships from Eyebeam, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been shown in Canada, the Bay Area, New York City, and South America. She is on the faculty of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. She prefers laughter.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Top: Northeastern

edge of island from shipping

channel

Bottom: Eastern edge of island from

shipping chan-nel

IMAGES

Top: Provisional structures, lagoon interior

Middle: Lagoon interior with mangroves and garbage

Lower: Island western edge panorama

IMAGES (cont’d)